A portion of every vehicle's new development cycle includes validating vehicle performance or components for automotive vehicles under cold weather conditions. Therefore, as part of a new vehicle development program, during the winter months, a team of engineers is dispatched to cold weather areas of the Midwest with the vehicles to be tested, to carry out a group of predetermined tests under cold weather conditions so as to evaluate the performance of the vehicles or components thereof under predetermined wintry conditions. For this purpose, most original equipment manufacturers have facilities in cold weather areas in the northern areas of the Midwest where winter conditions provide an appropriate environment to validate the vehicle's performance or components thereof under ice and snow conditions. Obviously, the occurrence and completion of these tests depends almost completely upon the temperament of the environment. Since the performance of these cold weather tests are completely subject to nature's elements, it is not unusual for a team of engineers with the vehicles or components to be tested to arrive at the test site and as a result of either weather changes or surface condition changes, they are unable to carry out the test or must wait for the proper climatic conditions in order to carry out the testing. This results in a significant loss of time by the test team, as well as great expense to the owner of the test facility in an attempt to maintain the surface conditions necessary to complete the testing.
In the past, many of these test sites were prepared prior to arrival of the test team by painting the surface upon which the tests were to be completed with a white paint. Thereafter, water would be floated onto the test track under freezing conditions so that the proper surface conditions could be acquired for testing to begin. Generally, ice thicknesses would be built-up to between five and six inches thick on the test track to prevent the loss of an ice surface during sunny days. Some melting was tolerated because overnight freezing temperatures would refreeze the melted portion. Snow was tolerable since it could easily be swept from the ice and if necessary a single pass of light water spray could recondition the surface to an acceptable frozen condition so that testing could be continued.
Although the white paint was very helpful in maintaining the ice surface, especially during sunny days, there were significant cost problems with the maintenance of the ice surface since the substrate which was normally concrete, had expansion strips buried into the substrate, which is normal, to compensate for expansion of the concrete material during the climatic changes. Unfortunately, the expansion strip was made from some form of an asphalt material which resulted in the expansion strip areas absorbing much more heat than the remainder of the substrate and therefore, the icy surface condition would change very rapidly in the area of the expansion joints and become unusable for purposes of testing the performance of the vehicles or components thereof. Again, as set forth above, the testing had to wait for the appropriate surface conditions to materialize naturally resulting from changing climatic conditions. Further, the use of white paint on a substrate also required high maintenance, in that, chipped areas or cracks acquired during warmer climates would have to be repainted, or resealed and repainted each year before building up an ice surface. Also, under normal conditions it was necessary to repaint the surface at least every other year. Therefore, every other year the painted areas had to be stripped and a new coat of fresh white paint needed to be reapplied. Some facilities just did not choose to incur such annual expense since some of these test facilities are as large as five acres. In such case, on sunny days, testing was limited, especially on asphalt surfaces, where the ice would be partially thawed resulting in unacceptable surface conditions for ongoing tests. It has been known in severe unstable conditions that the complete test team, including vehicles, had to be shipped to further northern areas of the world in order to ensure completion of the test conditions so as to validate the performance of the vehicles or components thereof in these extreme environmental conditions.
What is needed then is a test facility for automotive winter testing that can economically create a frozen surface, maintain and preserve this surface so that the cold weather test can be completed more efficiently without excessive cost and loss of time due to climate changes. Further, the creation of a frozen surface that provides these features is also useful for winter recreational purposes and winter sporting events.